Ultrasound Despeckling for Contrast Enhancement

Abstract

Images produced by ultrasound systems are adversely hampered by a stochastic process known as speckle. A despeckling method based upon removing outlier is proposed. The method is developed to contrast enhance B-mode ultrasound images. The contrast enhancement is with respect to decreasing pixel variations in homogeneous regions while maintaining or improving differences in mean values of distinct regions. A comparison of the proposed despeckling filter is compared with the other well known despeckling filters. The evaluations of despeckling performance are based upon improvements to contrast enhancement, structural similarity, and segmentation results on a Field II simulated image and actual B-mode cardiac ultrasound images captured in vivo.

Automatic mitral leaflet tracking in echocardiography by outlier detection in the low-rank representation

“…Interestingly, the ultrasound speckles were also depressed in the low-rank components, while the edges of the endocardium border were almost preserved. This also shows the potential of applying the low-rank representation on ultrasound despeckling [21].…”

Estimativa do movimento de estruturas em imagens ecográficas.

“…USDSAI is a metric that quantifies the improvement made by a filter to a speckled image [27]. This index is defined as…”

“…An alternative solution is to simulate the ultrasound images. Because of that, speckle noise simulation is a very common procedure in the literature [19]- [23], [25]- [27].…”

“…Since Field II is more realistic and due to its acceptance in the scientific community [26], [27], in this work we will utilize only Field II to simulate the US system.…”

“…This simulation has also been used previously by [26], [27]. A second simulation, Sim2, which was generated with different characteristics, was also performed.…”